Passive House towers are good

Photo of The House at Cornell Tech, the world's first Passive House high-rise. Image courtesy of Handel Architects.

Over the last 10 years, the passive house, a form of green design that originated in Germany, has surged in popularity. By creating an airtight building envelope with thick, insulated walls and triple-paned windows, passive houses can eliminate the need for heating and cooling systems in temperate climates and greatly minimize it in a place like New York.

But applying those design principles to the construction of a 26-story high-rise is more complicated than it is in a single-family home.
— The New York Times

The New York Times profiles Fernando Gómez-Baquero, a visiting doctoral researcher at the new Cornell Tech campus on New York's Roosevelt Island who lives in a 28-story, Handel Architects-designed Passive House residential tower. The tower is the world's tallest and largest Passive House building, according to the architects.

Life in the tower, where thermostats are kept between 68 and 75 degrees and a floor-by-floor energy usage is tallied in the lobby, is good, according to Gómez-Baquero. He told The New York Times, “I geek-out on this building. I was really fascinated by how you make a building this tall consume 60 to 70 percent less energy.”

Gómez-Baquero is the founder of ipHaus, an off-the-grid affordable housing development company.

Featured comments from our readers...

andrewmichler

Just a heads up passive houses are airtight @ >ach.60 at 50 pascals when you need them to be. They, of course, have great mechanical ventilation so its not the whims of weather or bath fans to get fresh air. But most also have operable windows that are a part of the calculation for passive cooling. Choice is good when most of the time the weather is not corporative.
Passive House design is as diverse as any type of architecture so any comment to esthetics should be at the foot of the developer, client and architect, not the physics of low energy.

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Passive House is just one of many types of energy efficient designs. I prefer buildings designed for energy efficiency and air movement (that have existed in every style forever), as opposed to airtight boxes. Good design will get you 80% there--designing spaces for use and context and site as opposed to oversized McMansion or McUrbanist building types. Pop media would be better looking into each building as its own story rather than chasing fads.

It is funny that this guy is proud of spending $3000/mo for a white dorm room on Roosevelt Island.

Jul 30, 19 1:36 pm

Featured Comment

andrewmichler

Just a heads up passive houses are airtight @ >ach.60 at 50 pascals when you need them to be. They, of course, have great mechanical ventilation so its not the whims of weather or bath fans to get fresh air. But most also have operable windows that are a part of the calculation for passive cooling. Choice is good when most of the time the weather is not corporative.
Passive House design is as diverse as any type of architecture so any comment to esthetics should be at the foot of the developer, client and architect, not the physics of low energy.

Chemex

Passive House is just basic design principles. It seems like this is "Passivhaus" a much stricter set of principles -- the airtight, glued windows. It seems like it is meant to offset other poor design principles like windows facing the sun, building orientation, etc. Of course this is better than nothing, especially when the program doesn't allow for brise soleil or total passive building design. But it still seems like a branding gimmick more than good design.

My def of McUrb is generally any cookie cutter scheme produced by developers/bureaucrats where the design comes from a spreadsheet, maximizing profit and false “efficiency.” Basically anti-architecture (though it usually involves a disempowered architect for branding purposes). See: Hudson Yards, Pruitt Igoe. If it were found that this passive house tower were less than advertised, and repeated elsewhere it might qualify ....